Arthur Miller's All My Sons

ARTHUR MILLER'S "ALL MY SONS"

A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan

University Public Worship

Stanford Memorial Church

July 4, 2010

Happy Fourth of July to all of you! "The kingdom of God has come near you," says Jesus in today's gospel lesson.[i] "Rejoice that your names are written in heaven."[ii] This is what we Americans at our highest moments have felt about our country. We have been the "hope and promise for mankind," as James Truslow Adams wrote in 1932 in his Epic of America."[iii] We have claimed the self-evident truths in our Declaration of Independence from England of July 4, 1776, that all of us have been endowed by our Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In this document, we've had a sacred creed, as Stanford graduate and recently deceased Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church has insisted.[iv] The English author G.K. Chesterton asserted, "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed." It is "a nation with the soul of a church."[v] Abraham Lincoln called the Declaration of Independence "spiritually regenerative," the touchstone of "our ancient faith" in a realm of human dignity, freedom and justice that has come near to us.[vi] Martin Luther King, Jr. had a "dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed."[vii] "America, America," we sang in our opening hymn, "God's gracious gifts abound."[viii]

The historical Jesus of Nazareth, of course, didn't know anything about the United States of America that was to be founded more than 1700 years after his death. But he commissioned seventy people to go out into the towns of Israel as laborers to gather in the harvest of those who could understand that the kingdom of God was near if only they kept their ears and eyes open. Sometimes his disciples were welcomed as they preached the good news, but often they were rejected. So also, the sacred American Dream has often been rejected or perverted by its citizens in the name of various idolatries: gold, conquest of indigenous people, economies based on slavery, robber baronage, and self-centered individualism. Those are the easy cases for us to condemn morally, however. The more difficult are those where other positive values, like family values, collide with national values, and where we need to make tough choices. I want to discuss with you a case of such collision of values this morning, brilliantly portrayed in Arthur Miller's play, All My Sons.

In it an American businessman named Joe Keller, in his sixties, is explored in his relations with his wife, his adult son, and some neighbors in his suburban community. It takes place soon after World War II, and his second fighter pilot son has been missing in action for three years. His wife is still holding out hope that Larry Keller will be found alive. Larry's girlfriend, Ann Deever, has come for a visit, later followed by her brother, George. They used to live in the neighborhood and were very close to the Keller family. Larry Keller's surviving brother, Chris, who also had been an army officer in the war, wants to ask Ann Deever to marry him, but his mother can't countenance it on the chance that Larry could turn up alive. Chris works for his father's heavy machine building plant, but he thinks he may need to leave town and the family business in order to begin a married life with Ann that won't destroy his mother.

We learn that Ann's father and Joe Keller used to be business partners, but Ann's father is now in prison, convicted of selling cylinder heads that he knew were cracked to the Army Air Force. They led to the crashes of twenty-one airplanes and the deaths of their pilots. Neither Ann nor her brother George Deever had ever visited their father nor written to him since Larry Keller went missing in action, because they realized that their father might well have been responsible for Larry's death.

There are poignant scenes in the play where we realize how much Joe has done for his family. He has worked hard to provide for his wife and children, and he wants his business to be re-named "Christopher Keller, Incorporated." He has good, solid family values.

In the second act, Ann's brother George Deever, now a lawyer, shows up in town. We now learn that a number of the neighbors think Joe Keller is as guilty as his business partner, Ann's and George's father. However, Joe had been acquitted at trial because he had an alibi of being sick at home and not being at the plant the day the decision was made to cover hairline cracks on a batch of cylinder heads. But George has finally spoken with his father in prison and found out that his father had been told by Joe Keller on the phone from his sickbed to weld the cracks -- cover them up in any way -- and ship out the defective cylinder heads. In a confrontation between Chris and Joe Keller near the end of the second act, Joe finally admits that he in fact had ordered the cracked cylinder heads to be sent out, thinking they'd be inspected and returned; by that time his manufacturing process would have been improved so that there'd be no more hairline cracks. Joe claims that he did it all for Chris, because otherwise he'd have been out of business with no company to pass on to Chris.

Then comes the most dramatic part of the play. Chris screams at his father: "For me! Where do you live, where have you come from? For me! --- I was dying every day and you were killing my boys and you did it for me? What the hell do you think I was thinking of, the Goddam business? Is that as far as your mind can see, the business? ...Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? ...You're not even an animal, no animal kills his own, what are you? What must I do to you? I ought to tear the tongue out of your mouth? What must I do, Jesus God, what must I do?"[ix]

The answer, according to today's gospel lesson, is first to recognize that good, conscientious people are often like lambs sent out into the midst of wolves. Chris is criticized by some of the neighbors as having been a naive idealist, as having believed in his father beyond all reasonable evidence. And yet, Chris really did take his father at his word and defended him against all enemies. He might have said, in the words of this morning's psalm,[x] "I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me."[xi] Jesus asked the seventy he commissioned to say in whatever house they entered, "Peace to this house." But what happens where there really isn't any peace in a house -- when it's full of lies and betrayal? Then Jesus told his disciples to say, "Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you."[xii] And that is ultimately what Chris Keller does with his father.

In the third and final act of the play, though, both Joe and Chris come to new realizations about themselves. Joe expands his value orientation beyond his own family to think about his nation -- appropriate for us to contemplate here on the Fourth of July. He understands that not only Larry and Chris are the sons whom he had to care for, but "They were all my sons." Hence the title of the play. Chris loses what his neighbors have called his "phony idealism" and becomes what he calls "practical," although for this he says he wants to spit on himself. He poignantly says to his father, "I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father." Chris grows up and sees that the world is not as black and white as he once thought, and he begins to develop a capacity to relate to others as having a mixture of virtue and vice, rather than being uni-dimensional.

I believe that's what we need as American citizens on the Fourth of July too. As international relations scholar Raymond C. Miller wrote about the United States fifty years ago, we are distinguished among the nations by the combined anticipation and resolve which constitutes the American Dream. But our Creator-endowed rights of life, liberty and happiness have also been used to define and pursue these values in individual ways, in virtually any direction and by almost any method. Americans sometimes have been pure and selfless, but often not.[xiii] And more significantly, we often forget the importance of our communitarian values in favor of individual liberties. It's not enough to think about the happiness of "me and my family" as Joe Keller did. We must also stand in the tradition of covenant -- of the Mayflower compact, of the cooperation of wagon trains moving across the prairies, in the camaraderie of military service, in coming together in barn raisings and peace rallies and gay pride celebrations and community service projects.

Happy Fourth of July. Although we're certainly not there yet, "the Kingdom of God has come near you." May we commit ourselves to learning more every day of peacemaking, justice and love.

BENEDICTION (Lao-Tse)

If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations, there must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities, there must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors, there must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home, there must be peace in the heart.

So be it. AMEN

NOTES

1

[i] Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20.

[ii] Luke 10:20.

[iii] James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1932).

[iv] Forrest Church, The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002), p. xi.

[v] G.K. Chesterton, as quoted in Church, American Creed, p. xii.

[vi] Abraham Lincoln, as quoted in Church, American Creed, p. xiii.

[vii] Martin Luther King, Jr., as quoted in Church, American Dream, p. xiii.

[viii] Miriam Therese Winter, 1993 adaptation of Katherine Lee Bates, "America the Beautiful" (1993).

[ix] Arthur Miller, All My Sons [1947] (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 70-71.

[x] Psalm 30

[xi] Psalm 30:1.

[xii] Luke 10: 3, 5, 10-11.

[xiii] Raymond C. Miller, Twentieth-Century Pessimism and the American Dream (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1961).